SPLC, student journalist sue Kan. community college over public records fees

College wants $24,000 to fill request

KANSAS — The
Student Press Law Center and a college journalist filed a lawsuit Tuesday against
Johnson County Community College in Kansas for excessive fees to release open
records, including nearly $10,000 to produce one day’s worth of emails.

The college estimated a total of $24,130.72 to fulfill
requests by the SPLC and former copy editor Marcus Clem for staff emails and
documents related to other open records requests.

Attorney Christopher Grenz, of the Kansas City law firm Bryan
Cave, who is handling the case pro bono as part of the SPLC’s attorney referral
network, said the fees are “facially excessive.”

“They’re basically hanging a price tag on what should be
public documents in order to keep those documents from being public,” Grenz
said.

The current requests in the lawsuit have evolved from an
original request by Rachel Kimbrough, current editor in chief at The Campus Ledger student newspaper at
JCCC. Clem said Kimbrough was working on a story about the closing of the
Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and departure of program director
Jason Rozelle.

According to the lawsuit, Kimbrough emailed Joseph Sopcich,
executive vice president of administrative services, in March asking for all
emails between Rozelle and Carmaletta Williams, the office’s executive
director, between Aug. 1, 2010 and March 1, 2011. Mark Ferguson, JCCC legal
counsel, replied in an email “there is a significant amount of time and expense
associated with your request.”

The college sent another reply stating costs to produce
emails for the seven-month span would be $47,426.

At the advice of the SPLC, Clem refined the request for
emails between Rozelle and Williams for a single day chosen at random, Jan. 16,
2011. He also requested all emails in December 2010 between Rozelle and a
professor, and for a list of all Kansas Open Records Act requests to the school
and its responses for 2010-11.

Sopcich, who did not return a request for comment by press
time, responded in May that it would cost $23,630.96 to fill the request.

Clem, who no longer works for The Campus Ledger, sent a
third request alongside an identical request from the SPLC. It was similar to
his previous request, except it requested emails from the following day, Jan.
17. The SPLC received a response from Sopcich in July detailing the costs,
including a $9,745.96 projection for the one day of emails, which the school
estimates totaled about 20 messages.

Contributing to that figure is $5,250 to contract an outside
agency for 25 hours of work at $210 per hour while the information services
department restores emails from a tape backup.

The school estimates $13,264.76 to produce the emails from
December. The three requests also include a total of four hours of legal work
at $250 per hour and $998 in photocopying costs for 4,990 pages at $.20 a page.

Clem said the paper was “prepared to pay strictly print
publishing costs at the time” but “didn’t understand why they were charging
that much just to retrieve the emails.”

Grenz said under the Kansas Open Records Act, the government
can charge a “reasonable” fee to retrieve public records but called the
school’s fee “ridiculous.”

Frank LoMonte, SPLC executive director, said the lawsuit
highlights a growing trend of charging large fees to produce open records.

“Without knowing what's going on behind the scenes, one of
two things is clear — either the college is overcharging for these records in
hopes that the students will shut up and go away, or it's overcharging in hopes
of turning the open-records act into a profit center,” LoMonte said. “We're
seeing this phenomenon all over the country, where agencies are ringing up
these jackpot bills for records, and it seems like public watchdogs are being
seen as an easy way for an agency in a budget crunch to turn a quick buck.
Public records belong to the public, and there's not supposed to be a mark-up
so that agencies can make a windfall profit by selling the public's own
information back to us.”

With the lawsuit filed today, Grenz said the school has 21
days to respond.

“It could take some time to get through all this, which is
unfortunate because this all started as a legitimate request for public records
so the student journalist could write a report,” he said. “The longer this goes
on, the more difficult it is for them to do their jobs.”